Words on a page that might help me, or you, someday, maybe.

Trope

Today I finished editing my novel. I’m finally done with it. It’s taken me long enough. It’s weird, I thought I’d swell with a sense of pride when I finally finished the thing, but I don’t really feel anything. Not relief, not pride, not excitement. It’s just… done.

I’ve wanted it done so that it’s one less thing on my mind. When I’m sat down in the evenings after work there’s always a little part of my subconscious that nags at me and tells me “You haven’t finished editing the novel yet, why are you watching an episode of Friends that you’ve seen literally seventy four times before?”

My subconscious can be a dick, but it has a point. I started writing this thing in my second year of University—five years ago—and if you read this blog with any sort of regularity you’ll be aware of the frequency at which I’ve picked up and dropped this particular incomplete project over the years.

I’m going to do the self-publishing thing and upload it to Kindle and Amazon Direct Publishing, just so that it’s out there in the world and not just sat on my Google Drive for the rest of my existence.

With that I have the issues that 1) I don’t really like the book and 2) it’s not very good. And by that I don’t mean the classic writer trope of reading your own work so much you begin to lose faith in it, I just mean that, well, I wrote it five years ago and some of the stuff in it isn’t particularly reflective of who I’ve become as a person or as a writer. Nothing problematic, just preferential. There are a couple of characters that are really incomplete, and if I’d written it at the age I am now, they’d be given more depth and detail.

But, as it is, it is complete. The copy edit is finished. I can almost guarantee that there is not a single typo left in the whole 60,000 word document. The only thing I need to do is format it into the filetype and dimensions preferred by the self-publishing platforms and then I can sit back and watch the pounds roll in.

That’s a joke, of course… It will only be pennies.

I realise that I’m not marketing this book very well pre-launch, but by this point that is not my intention, and that’s not really the intention of this blog. This blog is to document my life, and how my actions affect my mindset. I’ll let you know when my mindset begins to be affected by things…

There is the realistic possibility that somebody actually buys the book, at which point I’ll have made money from it, but that is not my intention by publishing it. I just need to fully complete this process, once and for all. Maybe that’s why I don’t feel anything yet. Because it’s not yet completely finished.

I just want to be able to wash my hands of it. For it to be out there in the world and for me to be able to say “That’s mine. I did that.”

My only real goal in life is to be sat on a train and see a stranger reading a book that I’ve written, but that’s not going to happen with this one. And I’ve already accepted that. I just need to treat it as a practice run—a warm up—because if I want this theoretical passenger on this hypothetical train to buy my book, then it’s going to have to a good one. And I’m not there yet.